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July 31, 2001 - rainbows of racial harmony- For the lay people in the audience, I guess I should explain this a little. Some of you might have noticed the new "Free Dmitry Sklyarov" link over in the side panel. Dmitry is a Russian citizen being held under arrest in the United States for what is the equivalent of opening up a sealed envelope with a letter opener (or "circumvention device" -- not to be confused with a circumcision device). What did he do to deserve imprisonment? Let's see if I can explain it. Say I want to send a letter to my friend Jackie, but I don't want her mom to read it because it has multiple occurrences of the word "anal". So to foil any maternal prying, I take my letter and change every "a" to "b", every "b" to "c", every "c" to "d", and so on (changing every "z" to "a", for you keeners). It would make all my letters look like this: J uijol uibu tusbqpo bdujpo csplf nz qpp qjqft. Very hard for her mom to read. Now here's the tricky legal bit. If Jackie tells anybody, anybody at all, that to read my letters, all they have to do is rotate the characters back by one, then she could go to jail for up to five years. Sound ridiculous? That's because it is. What I just described is pretty much what Dmitry Sklyarov did. Adobe corporation sold some software to let eBook publishers rotate their documents forward by thirteen characters. Dmitry said "Hey, all you gotta do is rotate them back thirteen characters, and they can be read." He made a mistake though. He said it out loud in the United States. Now he's in jail. For those of you thinking that it's all good because you're in friendly, free, "good government" Canada, enjoy it while you can, because it looks like a Canadian version of the DMCA is right around the corner. Our goodly government officials and employees have provided an email address for the people to have their say, but I wonder what will ring louder in parliament's ears, the concerns of the citizens, or the lumbering about of the corporations... Anyway, sorry for being all serious. Probably been listening to too much Chuck D. If you do feel like sending an email, please think about what you write, and dont be a lamer about it. More information about this horrible law and it's effects can be found at freesklyarov.org and anti-dmca.org. Time is all about that aerial locomotion. This is the 50th installment of Baked Babies. We've been doing this since Febuary 21. Wow. Thanks to all the fans and friends and surveilling FBI agents who keep our hit counts up. To celebrate, I've done a little coding on the site, changed the design a little, and made it possible to add attributions to the quote of the day. Peace. -Otto Jeremiah DeFayhe |
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